The Post Office in Llandrindod Wells: From High Street to Station Crescent

Before the telephone became commonplace, before radio, and long before electronic communication, the Post Office was one of the places through which Llandrindod Wells reached the outside world. Letters carried family news, business orders, bills, invitations and notices. Telegrams brought messages which could not wait. Parcels, money orders and, later, telephone calls passed through the same system. For visitors staying in the town’s hotels and boarding houses, the Post Office maintained contact with home. For shopkeepers, farmers and professional men, it formed part of the ordinary machinery of business. Its history is therefore much more than the story of three buildings, and forms part of the wider story of the making of Llandrindod Wells. It follows the development of Llandrindod itself, from the small settlement which grew around the railway and mineral springs, through the great years of the Victorian and Edwardian resort, to the administrative centre which eventually required a substantial purpose-built Post Office of its own.

The locations occupied by the Post Office are important in their own right. The first stood at No. 2 High Street, among the shops and businesses of the developing railway town. Its successor occupied a prominent position at the corner of Park Terrace and Park Crescent, close to Rock Park, the hotels and the boarding houses which catered for the seasonal influx of visitors. The third, opened at Station Crescent in 1937, belonged to a much larger postal and communications system, while remaining close to the railway which had done so much to create modern Llandrindod in the first place. The Post Office did not simply change address. Its successive locations reflect the changing geography and changing character of the town.

The beginnings of the Post Office and John Evans

Postal provision at Llandrindod existed before the growth of the Victorian spa. A small sub-office operated during the middle years of the nineteenth century, initially under Builth and later under Rhayader, but that earlier arrangement appears to have disappeared during the 1850s. The more continuous history of the modern Post Office began with the railway age. Around 1868 or 1869 a new office was established and Llandrindod became a Railway Sub Office, carrying the postal designation E62. The timing was significant. The railway had transformed the prospects of the wells. Visitors could reach the district with far greater ease, hotels and lodging houses multiplied, shops and businesses appeared, and the amount of correspondence entering and leaving the place inevitably increased. Mail could arrive by train, be sorted locally and distributed through the town and surrounding countryside, while outgoing correspondence could be collected and returned to the railway for onward transmission. In a scattered rural district, where distances were considerable and journeys could still be difficult, that connection mattered greatly.

The man most closely associated with these early years was John Evans. Born at Knighton around 1841 or 1842, Evans appears to have become postmaster at about the time the permanent railway-era office was established, and later evidence suggests that he had held the position from the beginning. By 1871 he was advertising prominently from the Llandrindod Wells Post Office. His establishment would, however, have looked rather different from the purpose-built Post Offices familiar to later generations. Like many Victorian postmasters in smaller towns, Evans combined official postal duties with private trade. Customers could obtain groceries, drapery, stationery, fancy goods and fishing tackle. Guidebooks were sold for the benefit of visitors, together with other goods suited to the needs of a growing spa town. Postal business took place within the same commercial setting.

That mixture of public service and private trade tells us much about early Victorian Llandrindod. Someone entering Evans’s premises might have gone in to buy writing paper, post a letter, ask about the next mail, purchase groceries or obtain something for a visitor staying at the wells. The Post Office was not yet a detached institution. It formed part of the everyday commercial life of High Street. We can now place that office at No. 2 High Street, immediately beside Salop House at No. 1. The 1891 census sequence places the Post Office directly alongside Salop House, while an Urban District Council record of March 1898 refers specifically to a storeroom at the rear of the old Post Office in High Street for E. Careless of Salop House. The location made sense. High Street was part of the commercial heart of the young town, a street whose changing public life can also be seen in the history of the Llandrindod Wells Market Hall, and stood within easy reach of the railway. Residents, tradesmen and visitors were already passing through this part of Llandrindod in the ordinary course of business.

John Evans therefore occupied more than a shop. For nearly three decades he stood at one of the principal points through which the growing town communicated with the outside world. He died at Salop House on 23 March 1896, aged fifty-four. His death notice described him simply as “John Evans, postmaster.” He was buried at Llandrindod Old Church. His death came at almost exactly the point when the Post Office itself was about to enter a new phase.

From High Street to Park Terrace

During 1896 the Post Office moved from No. 2 High Street to larger premises at the corner of Park Terrace and Park Crescent, close to the area later known as Gwalia Square. The move was significant not merely because the office gained more space, but because of where it was placed. Park Terrace belonged to the expanding resort. It stood close to Rock Park and the mineral springs, while the surrounding streets contained hotels and boarding houses which filled with visitors during the season. The Post Office had moved from the older commercial centre into one of the busiest parts of Victorian Llandrindod.

For visitors this was a convenient position. They could send letters and postcards, collect correspondence, arrange telegrams and conduct other postal business within easy walking distance of their lodgings. For hotel and boarding-house proprietors, whose businesses depended upon enquiries, bookings, bills and letters from prospective guests, the Post Office was an important neighbour. Historic photographs and postcards show the building clearly, with POST OFFICE displayed prominently across the frontage. Unlike John Evans’s earlier establishment, this was a building immediately recognisable as part of the town’s public life.

The timing of the move is interesting. John Evans died in March 1896 and the transfer took place during the same year. It is possible that the move was already being prepared before his death, and building activity associated with J. P. Page in Park Terrace and Park Crescent during 1895 suggests that changes in this part of the town were already under way. The Evans family nevertheless remained closely connected with the postal service. By 1901 John’s widow, Jane Evans, was recorded as postmistress, while their son Howard worked as a Post Office clerk. For a period, therefore, one family had become closely woven into the communications of the town.

Jane’s position was not unusual. Women had long served as sub-postmistresses in smaller communities, and widows sometimes continued offices previously associated with their husbands. In a town such as Llandrindod the postmistress occupied a position of considerable familiarity and responsibility. The hours were demanding. By the beginning of the twentieth century weekday postal business extended from about seven in the morning until half past eight at night. Telegraph business occupied much of the day, while even Sunday brought limited periods of service. The Post Office had become a place which rarely stood still.

A Victorian and Edwardian communications centre

To understand the importance of the Post Office it is necessary to think about the range of people who used it. For families, letters remained the ordinary means of maintaining contact over distance. A son or daughter living elsewhere, someone in domestic service, a relative who had moved to an industrial town or a family member who had emigrated could remain part of family life through correspondence. For shopkeepers and tradesmen the post was part of business. Orders, accounts, invoices and instructions travelled by letter, while money orders and postal orders provided ways of sending payments without relying upon a conventional bank account. For the hotel and boarding-house trade, correspondence was essential. Prospective visitors wrote to enquire about rooms, confirmed bookings, sent instructions ahead and maintained contact with home while they were away.

Llandrindod’s strongly seasonal character must have affected the volume of mail considerably. During the summer months the population increased as visitors arrived for the waters, entertainment and social life of the resort. With them came further letters, telegrams and postcards. The picture postcard was particularly suited to a place such as Llandrindod. Visitors bought views of the lake, Rock Park, the Pump House, hotels and streets, wrote a few words on the back and sent them to relatives and friends elsewhere. Many of the postcards which now provide some of the best visual evidence for old Llandrindod once began their journey through this postal network.

The office was equally important to the countryside beyond the town. Farmers, estate employees and families in scattered rural communities depended upon the post for bills, newspapers, official notices, business correspondence and personal news. The postman setting out from Llandrindod carried with him a regular connection between isolated households and the wider world. By the beginning of the twentieth century the main Post Office formed only one part of a broader local network. There was a sub-office at the Level Crossing, while letter boxes stood at Temple Street, the Pump Hotel, Ridgebourne, the railway station, Wellfield and Pleasant Villa. These were modest pieces of infrastructure, but together they formed the communications network of the town.

The responsibilities of the Post Office became more complicated as new forms of communication arrived. The telegraph had already changed expectations. A letter could take time to reach its destination, but a telegram could carry urgent information much more quickly. Telegrams were used for business instructions, travel arrangements, family announcements and emergencies. Their arrival could bring relief or anxiety. A telegram might confirm an appointment, announce the safe arrival of a relative or carry news which could not wait until the next post. It might equally bring word of illness or death. Llandrindod’s Post Office dealt with telegraph business as part of its normal work, with messages handed across the counter, transmitted and then delivered at their destination by messenger.

Then came the telephone. By the early years of the twentieth century telephone poles and wires were appearing in the town, while later works included communications infrastructure through Park Crescent, Park Terrace and neighbouring streets. The manual telephone exchange was eventually housed in the Park Terrace Post Office. Within the lifetime of one generation the change was remarkable. People who had grown up in a world dominated by letters and horse travel were now living in a town linked by railway, telegraph and telephone. Behind those systems lay a great deal of human labour. Letters had to be collected and sorted by hand. Mailbags had to meet trains. Telegrams had to be transmitted and delivered. Telephone calls had to be connected manually.

The status of the Llandrindod office grew alongside these responsibilities. In 1892 the official postal name changed from Llandrindod to Llandrindod Wells. More importantly, in 1905 the office became an independent post town or head office rather than simply a Railway Sub Office. This reflected the changing status of Llandrindod itself. The town had become the administrative centre of Radnorshire, with growing responsibilities in local government, commerce, professional life and tourism. Its Post Office was no longer serving only the immediate settlement. It had become the centre of a wider district. The building was altered as the amount of work increased, with an addition recorded in 1905 and further alterations in 1910. By 1915 the responsibilities of the Llandrindod head postmaster extended further across the surrounding postal network, including oversight connected with Knighton.

The range of services associated with the Post Office was also widening. Across Britain, Post Offices had become concerned not only with letters and parcels but with money orders, postal orders, savings-bank business and other forms of public administration. From 1909 they were also associated with the payment of Old Age Pensions. Not every national service can be documented at Llandrindod in every individual year, but the wider development matters. By the Edwardian period the Post Office had become one of the places where ordinary people encountered both communications and government services in their daily lives.

The campaign for a new Post Office

The success of the Park Terrace office eventually created its own problem. By the 1920s postal, telegraph and telephone work had grown beyond the capacity of premises which had seemed adequate when they opened in 1896. By the middle of the decade the government was already considering replacement accommodation, and in 1925 H.M. Office of Works surveyed a site in Station Crescent for a new Post Office.

Two years later the condition of the existing building had become a matter for Parliament. On 14 February 1927 the accommodation at Llandrindod Wells Post Office was raised in the House of Commons. Complaints included unhealthy conditions, inadequate staff facilities and the absence of a proper retiring room for male employees. The Postmaster-General acknowledged deficiencies in the building and confirmed that land for a replacement office had already been acquired.

Yet nothing happened quickly. In October 1929 Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council was still pressing for action. At its monthly meeting members agreed to send a deputation to the Postmaster-General in the hope of securing the erection of the long-promised new office. The contemporary newspaper report made the position particularly clear. A site was already owned by the Department. By that point the problem was no longer finding somewhere to build. The problem was getting the building built.

Further correspondence concerning the proposed Post Office survives from 1933, and by 1935 H.M. Office of Works was producing detailed plans associated with the Station Crescent site. What finally appeared in 1937 had therefore been under discussion for more than a decade. The new Post Office was not a sudden improvement. It was the result of years of local pressure, official correspondence and delay.

Station Crescent and the changing town

The new Post Office finally opened in Station Crescent on Wednesday, 8 December 1937. Once again, the location was significant. The building stood close to the railway station and within the part of the town which had long acted as a gateway for passengers, goods and communications. The postal service had grown far beyond the small Railway Sub Office of the nineteenth century, but its relationship with transport remained important.

What had changed was the scale of the operation. Llandrindod Wells was now the head office for a considerable district. The new building had to deal with postal, telephone and telegraph work, staff accommodation, engineering requirements and motor transport. It was no longer sufficient to adapt rooms within a commercial property. The town required a purpose-built communications centre. The new premises were planned under H.M. Office of Works, with Henry E. Seccombe associated with the design, while T. F. Howells Ltd of Caerphilly carried out the building work.

Contemporary descriptions made clear why the move had become necessary. Postal, telegraph and telephone traffic had increased to the point where the Park Terrace premises could no longer provide satisfactory accommodation. The opening brought to an end a process which had begun at least twelve years earlier. Within days, photographs recorded the first telegram being transmitted from the new building. At about the same time the manual telephone exchange associated with Park Terrace gave way to an automatic exchange.

After around forty years as the town’s Post Office, the Park Terrace building had reached the end of its public role. It remained standing, and in 1947 and 1948 local authority records referred to the conversion of the old Post Office at Gwalia Square into flats. A building which had once handled the correspondence, telegrams and telephone calls of the town became residential property.

The three principal Post Office locations provide an unusually clear way of reading the development of Llandrindod Wells. No. 2 High Street belonged to the first great period of expansion after the railway arrived. The Post Office was still part shop and part public service, standing among the businesses of the emerging town. Park Terrace belonged to the great age of the resort, when the office stood among the hotels and boarding houses close to Rock Park and the mineral springs. Station Crescent belonged to a different Llandrindod. By 1937 the town was not merely a spa resort but an administrative centre and the head of a postal district, serving a much wider area and handling forms of communication which would scarcely have been imaginable when John Evans began his work in High Street.

The Post Office had followed the town. It began among the shops, moved into the heart of the resort and finally occupied a substantial headquarters close to the railway upon which so much of its earlier success had depended.

Its real history, however, lies with the people who used it. It lies with John Evans opening his High Street premises in the morning, combining postal work with the ordinary trade of the young town, and with Jane Evans continuing the family connection after his death. It lies with the visitor writing home from a boarding house, the hotel proprietor waiting for a booking, the shopkeeper placing an order, the farmer receiving correspondence from outside the district and the family waiting for news of someone far away. It lies with the postman setting out into the surrounding countryside, the sorting clerk working behind the counter, the telegram messenger carrying urgent news through the streets and the telephone operator connecting calls by hand.

The buildings changed. The technology changed. The town around them changed. The purpose remained much the same.

For generations, the Post Office was one of the principal places through which Llandrindod Wells communicated with the wider world. Its history is therefore not simply the history of stamps, letters or buildings. It is part of the history of how Llandrindod grew, how its centre shifted, how its people did business, how its visitors remained connected with home, and how a small Victorian spa became part of an increasingly connected modern world.

Sources and Further Reading

Contemporary census returns for Llandrindod Wells.

Post Office directories and postal records relating to Llandrindod and Llandrindod Wells.

Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council building plans and registers, Powys Archives, including records relating to the former High Street Post Office, alterations to the Park Terrace premises and the later Station Crescent Post Office.

Radnorshire County Council architectural records, including the 1925 survey of the Station Crescent site for H.M. Office of Works.

Brecon and Radnor Express and Carmarthen Gazette, including the death notice of John Evans, March 1896.

Wellington Journal, 19 October 1929.

House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates, 14 February 1927, concerning accommodation at Llandrindod Wells Post Office.

Contemporary newspaper reports relating to the opening of the Station Crescent Post Office in December 1937.

Historic photographs and postcards of High Street, Park Terrace, Gwalia Square and Station Crescent.

Powys Archives and People’s Collection Wales, material relating to the development of Llandrindod Wells and its former Post Office buildings.

The Postal Museum, contextual material relating to Victorian and Edwardian postal services, postal workers, telegraphs, postcards, financial services and the development of the British Post Office.

The feature image is a historic view of Park Crescent, showing the Llandrindod Wells Post Office at the corner with Park Terrace, the premises which served the town from 1896 until the opening of the Station Crescent office in 1937.